Journeys

         

                -1-

Stretch your limbs on a hard earned
Lower berth, smell the fresh white sheet,
Close your eyes and swing leisurely
With the rhythms of the land boat,

There is no question of being lonely,
Three people may come and sit beside your prostrated body, and indulge in talk, domestic chatter, Indian economy, the latest android, and atrocities on women.
You can shrink your legs or stay put,
Or get up and jump into the convergence,
Company is assured.

Chaiwalas will wake you up in the morning, or the breakfast sellers,
As you lazily look into the day,
The changing scenes amaze you
With new terrain and novel architecture.
Inside and outside, you will feel fulfilled,
Quite a journey it has been.

                           -2-

As you near the giant structure
Made of glass and sophistication,
You feel your stomach revolting,
As a fear equal to an approaching examination grips you, and you go through this and that, and another this born from that, like a machine, watching others, trying to learn new lessons.

Waiting, you can get to see
A small universe, walking up and down the tiled floors, amazed at the
Ideas matching in panorama, faces, clothes, voices and scenes.
Nobody budges a lot, inside, except
Monotonous voices of the uniformed attendants, babies only howl a couple of times, and expensive eatables come on carts to persecute the travellers with zombie smiles, the task gets done,

There is no sky sometimes,
You look for things in the ether for sometime and doze, after desperate efforts to see backwards and front, to see human faces, an oppressive silence
Hangs in the confined and neat space,
As if all wait for a trial and the upcoming results, or for an impending disaster that does not happen.

The journey does not end on the ground,
It stretches further till you get your baggages and walk out of the path
And walk into life,
But here, if you stay around,
It gets lonelier.

This New Summer

Things came sitting
On time' s wing,
Noiselessly stole the poetry of
The summer afternoons,
Stole the aloneness and the lingering
Thoughts that often stretched
From nowhere to nowhere
And got pregnant with songs.

There was a search that
Had neither end nor intermission,
A joy waited expectantly to jump into
The humid moments of unbearable Loneliness, 

It waited without a hint
Of anyone' s arrival or appearance.

The evenings came, dull,warm and not
So cheerless, yet spoke of hope,
That hanged unto dreams of
The real and the unreal.

All that is left of the summer
Is webs of entangled
Conversations, words that get lost in the air afterwards, and a weird
Barrenness, that has come
To stay here, forever.